Customising Opportunities
You can customise CRM to reflect your sales pipeline by modifying the following Opportunity field values: Type, Stage, Source Of Business, Probability and Loss Reason. You can do this from Admin > Settings > Sales Pipeline.
You can use custom values in all these fields to organise and segment your sales pipeline. Following is further information about how and why you would customise each field.
When working with each field, you will have a toolbar to Add new options, Edit or Delete existing options and Cancel to exit the settings for a selected field (shown in the examples below).
This field can be influenced by the Stage field e.g. you can associate different Types with Stages so that the selection made in the Stage field populates your Type field with relevant options.
Type field in Opportunity Settings
Stage choices are associated with the Status and Type fields:
- The Status field choices cannot be customised and are set to Open, Won or Lost – you can choose which of these options will apply to each of your Stage field options.
- You can also specify which Types are linked to your Stage i.e. when you choose a Stage option, the options that will appear in the Type field will be based on what you have configured when you set up your Stage field options. You can have multiple Types linked to a Stage.
The example below shows the editing of a Stage field option, showing the Types and Status choices the field will have an impact on – when the Enquiry option is selected on a form, the following things will happen:
- The Type field will display ‘Sales’ as the only choice.
- The record Status field will be set to ‘Open’.
Editing the Stage field in Opportunity Settings
This is where you can add different labels that each have a numerical value assigned to them – you can then use the value to sort and prioritise your Opportunities e.g. a low probability Opportunity might have a value of 1 and a high probability Opportunity might have a value of 10. The following is an example of how you could configure your Probability options.
Example of the Probability field in Opportunity Settings
This is where you can add a list of the reasons that explain why an Opportunity was lost e.g. Could not contact, Lost interest, Bought elsewhere etc.
Having appropriate options here will help you to troubleshoot your sales, for example, if a high percentage of your Opportunities are closed with a Loss Reason “Lost interest”, you would be able to use this information to adjust your sales process and contact your leads and prospects more frequently to keep them engaged, thus giving you a greater chance of retaining future sales.
Example of the Loss Reason field in Opportunity Settings